California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia used to get flak for the traditional structure of his poems.

California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia used to get flak for the traditional structure of his poems.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

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Dana Gioia, the state’s new poet laureate, intends to bring his poetry to every one of California’s 58 counties.

Dana Gioia, the state’s new poet laureate, intends to bring his poetry to every one of California’s 58 counties.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

To rhyme’s no crime, says poet Dana Gioia

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When Dana Gioia was appointed California’s poet laureate in December, emails and letters began pouring in from across the state inviting him to visit. But the one invitation he’s been waiting for has yet to arrive — the one from his hometown of Hawthorne, in Los Angeles County.

“I have been waiting my whole life for someone in Hawthorne to invite me back, but it’s never happened,” he said.

Gioia is sure his invitation will eventually arrive. But in the meantime, the silence serves as a reminder that it’s his civic duty to give the public a reason to care about poetry.

As would-be presidents storm across the country in search of potential voters, Gioia is preparing to travel throughout California seeking out poetry lovers. During his two-year term, he intends to visit each of the state’s 58 counties to give readings and meet people.

It’s an ambitious plan, given Gioia’s teaching schedule at the University of Southern California and his other writing projects (just this month he published a new book of poetry). But sitting in his study in Sonoma County near Santa Rosa, Gioia seems to radiate confidence and determination.

“You never forget as poet laureate that it’s your responsibility and your privilege to try to speak to everyone,” he said. “The challenge of the arts in the 21st century is to discover how to create a cultural conversation that is as inclusive as possible.”

Ever since he was young, Gioia has intuitively recognized the cultural accessibility of art. Born in 1950 in a poor, working-class town on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he learned his first poems from his Chicana mother, a telephone operator who liked to recite odes by Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling and James Whitcomb Riley. His Sicilian and Mexican grandfathers had only a fourth-grade education, but they taught him “campfire” poems in Sicilian and Spanish.

“I’m very conscious that we should not stereotype people into literary versus non-literary people,” Gioia said. “For almost everyone, some work of literature has been important to their inner formation.”

Gioia became the first person in his family to attend college, graduating from Stanford. (His younger brother, Ted, also attended Stanford and went on to become a noted jazz historian.) Eager to pursue the arts in some capacity, Gioia decided to pursue academia as a career path. He eventually obtained a master’s degree from Harvard, but he disliked the artificial, insular feeling of the academic world.

“I didn’t want to write poetry in a way that the people I came from couldn’t understand,” Gioia said, also noting that, “I was a terribly serious and pretentious young man — I needed to get out of graduate school.”

Poet's Corner

Gioia returned to Stanford to attend business school, earning a master’s degree in business with minimal enthusiasm.

“Probably no student in the history of Stanford Business School did less work and still graduated than I did,” he said. “I made myself a promise that I would spend three hours a day working on my writing before I did my schoolwork.”

Soon after graduating, Gioia landed a marketing job at General Foods Corp. He continued to write poems at night, but for years he kept this a secret from his co-workers. At work, his crowning achievement was the creation of Jell-O Jigglers, which revitalized the flagging Jell-O industry. Nevertheless, Gioia looks back on this period of his life with great fondness.

“I worked, I wrote and then I had a family,” he said. “In a curious way, it was one of the happiest times of my life.”

His happiness was shattered in 1987 after his infant son, Michael Jasper Gioia, died of sudden infant death syndrome. Grief-stricken, Gioia took stock of his life.

“Coming out of that experience, I realized that what really mattered to me was my family, my writing and my sense of my life as a spiritual journey,” he said. “My career didn’t really matter to me, and money didn’t really matter to me very much.”

Gioia soon quit his job and started working as a freelancer. In 1991 he published an article titled “Can Poetry Matter?” that criticized mainstream poetry for operating as a closed subculture. The article made a wave in the literary world, drawing praise and fury from critics.

“I don’t think making observations about writing workshops or learning to write through emulation combines to a scathing indictment of contemporary creative writing programs,” Gioia said. “But writing people are very sensitive.”

To be fair, Gioia has been baffling critics for decades. During the 1980s, he was mockingly labeled as the champion of “New Formalism” because he liked to write poems in traditional rhyme and meter. It’s a critique that has always puzzled Gioia, who recognized that most people like structure to their poems.

“When I started, it was considered un-American,” he said. “But the times have changed because hip-hop has reminded intellectuals that average people like meter, rhyme and form — these are not elitist tools.”

Gioia was able to put some of his populist principles into action when he was appointed chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003. Over the course of his six-year term, he developed popular programs like Poetry Out Loud and Operation Homecoming. He also actively campaigned to make NEA grants available in every congressional district, ruffling some feathers in the process.

“People thought this was political,” Gioia said. “And yes, it was political in the very basic sense that if you wanted to serve all Americans, you had to go where Americans lived.”

As California’s poet laureate, Gioia has greatly narrowed the scope of his mission. He’s serving only 39 million people, but it’s in a state that he spent decades pining for from the East Coast. And if half of Gioia’s job is to encourage people to engage with poetry, his other less official duty is to make people fall in love with California. Maybe it’s his marketing experience, but Gioia has a very good pitch.

“We are living in a natural landscape and an urban scape that has never really been fully captured in poetry, and we get the chance to describe it,” he said. “That’s like Adam being asked to name the animals.”